What Is Visible: A Novel (15 page)

I
know that Doctor was not pleased by my showing at the fund-raiser last month, and I could tell that Combe seemed to be troubling over my head. For the first time, his touch was fumbling and hesitant, but I have asked both Julia and Jeannette, and they said all was fine. What a pity Wightie could not leave her sickbed that day. I could trust her for a full report. But she and Julia are both treating me so kindly of late that I could never complain. Doctor left the day after the event, and so we have not spoken. He didn’t even say good-bye. But I will patch the rift between us, as I always do, because if Doctor will not accept Mr. Bond, then he must find me a suitable young person, soft-skinned and well-spelled, from among his vast acquaintance for the commencement of the new life for which I am exceedingly ready.

And just in case Combe has in any way disparaged me phrenologically, then I will endeavor to appeal to Doctor on his terms, however misguided I find them. Clearly, the way to his heart is through my head. First I will fatten my affection bump so that the enormity of my capacity for love will be impossible to miss. I tried once before to elevate its standing at the top of my head by beating on it with the ends of my knitting needles, but that increased it hardly at all. Now I have a whole week, and this time I will not shy from employing the best tools at my disposal: the heels of my Sunday lace-up dress boots. I will make certain that Doctor will not perceive my faculties as greatly changed, but only rendered more pronounced by his acute perception on the matter.

I take the boot with me to bed and pull up the blankets, leaving only the top of my head uncovered. I hit myself hard on the spot I have studied from the raised charts he has given me. Harder, harder, and it hurts, yes, it hurts, but it will be worth it. While I do not believe that my character, especially my ability to love faithfully and well, is sealed within the physiognomy of my skull, Doctor does, and so I rally my cause—
T
o Love! To Love!
—with each shuddering vibration through my temples and down my jaw. I move the heel of the boot closer to the front of my head and strike at the positions of benevolence and veneration, because I know that these are the qualities that impress Doctor most and are his own largest visible faculties.

I have been careful, ever so careful, to wear my cotton bonnet all week so that no one might observe the heightening of my bumps. I have used the excuse of helping to clean and scrub the premises for Doctor’s arrival, because I always wear my bonnet when I clean so that no strands of hair might escape and be dirtied. Miss Wight was pleased because I am an excellent cleaner. If you sit me down and give me some good rags and a bucket of soapy water, I will scrub and scrub until you tell me everything is spotless. This quality will also prove me a good wife; the only bad thing is wearing the heavy cleaning gloves, but they are necessary to protect the softness of my hands, which Doctor will soon be touching.

I run the duster over the top of my armoire and let the feathers stroke the heads of my Laura dolls. As I tickle the tiny molded toes, it occurs to me that if I am to have a
real
life—the
realest
life—then I must no longer allow myself to quicken with these constant reminders of my fame. The little girls who cuddled me are all grown up, and most of them probably have their own babies to play with now, as I intend to. Carefully, I take the dolls down from the armoire and place them in a heap on the bed beside me. One at a time, I rock each Laura to sleep, humming a tuneless lullaby I’m sure would make a real baby cry, and before I push the dolls into the dark beneath my bed, I untie the ribbon from the sightless eyes of each porcelain head. I braid the ribbons into a thick, soft plait, and then fold it beneath my pillow because Mama says the color green will bring me luck. But it is yearning alone that glimmers in my darkness, and the shades of my deepest desires cannot be described, just as I am certain that the color that is God is not known to any man.

I pat the hands of my clock’s glassless face over the armoire—it’s almost time! The bonnet comes off and I check the bumps. They are raised and sore, the veneration one, especially. I hope they are not red. I’ve woken every morning with a headache from the boot’s work, but the pain is nothing compared to gaining my share of life’s affections. I part my hair in the middle, then make two braids and coil them into buns above my ears so that the bumps are shown to their best advantage. I have even taken the additional charge of plucking a few hairs from the tops of each of them, so that they might be seen more clearly. I change into my best Sunday dress, my only silk one—a rose-pink
robe à l’anglaise
that Miss Wight says gives me color—and lace up the boots that have nearly knocked me senseless. I slip the shade over my eyes and go to meet Doctor, as nervous as I have ever been.

I sit in my chair by the hearth, pinching at my cheeks to redden them, and wave away Wightie’s attempts at conversation. I am almost faint with worry when suddenly the air shimmies with heat and I feel the floorboards tense and then shift heavily—Doctor at last! But he doesn’t come near me for a good ten minutes, probably talking with Miss Wight, and I force myself to wait patiently for him like a lady. Finally, the chair beside me is pulled out, and his hand takes mine.

“L,” he writes, “you’re looking very well.”

Ah, he has forgiven me already. He lifts my hand to his face so that I may feel myself how well he is looking.

“And you,” I write as I limn the familiar perfection of his profile. “How was your trip?”

“Good. What happened to your head?”

“Nothing,” I reply. “Fine.”

“Looks like a woodpecker got loose. Banged on bed frame?”

That is what he sees—an
accident
—when I want him to see my future? So I am not forgiven. “Still angry about the Jesus?”

“You know it was wrong.”

“Calvinists have money too.” I’d wager that I actually helped further the causes of the Institution with my display.

“Yes,” he says, “but you hurt me very much. And Combe.”

I struggle to say I’m sorry, but instead my thumb strays across the beloved hairs on his knuckles. Is it possible that being grown-up means one is not forgiven, except by God?

“Dear L,” he writes, as if composing a letter to me, as if we were corresponding from across the ocean, though I am trembling right here in his hands. “Made special trip back just for you.” His fingers stiffen, as if he’s finding it difficult to write, and I worry that he might have contracted the rheumatism. Mama has it, and she can scarcely bend her fingers to converse with me. “Went to see your family.”

“Mama and Papa well?”

“Of course,” he spells. “Miss you very much, and we all think…” His fingers stop, only the warmth of them hovering above my palm, and then he etches the words into my soul, firmly and furiously. “It’s best if you go home.”

“For visit?”

“To stay.”

My fingers panic; they scrabble all over his palm, paw at his arm. I am squeezing his hands, reaching for his face. Doctor pulls away until I stop moving and sit still, my hands shaking, but folded in my lap. After an eternity, he reaches for me again.

“Education finished here. Nothing left to teach you.”

I write as deliberately as he does, though usually we are both so quick with each other that no one else could possibly keep up. “Don’t you see I am ready?” I will have to say it. “Ready for love.”

“Of course your family loves you,” he says, and I realize that he does not see me at all.

“Mr. Bond,” I write. I don’t really want him but he is what God has presented. I wipe at the wetness soaking through my shade.

He pats my arm. “Don’t worry for Wight.”

What does Wightie have to do with it? “Wight leaving?”

“Work with you finished.”

He has got things all wrong. The heat of the whole house presses down on me, setting alight the useless bumps on my head, and the disembodied eyes of all the blind girls circle me, strung on garlands. Now I shiver with cold, and the high laughter of Julia and her children freezes into icicles that plunge from the ceiling but do not shatter. The slop of all the soups and puddings rises, and a thousand roses prick me all at once.

Doctor’s fingers thorn again the hollow of my palm, but I am thinking about my favorite Bible passage, Mark 7:32–34:
And they bring unto Jesus the one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech him to put his hand upon him. And he took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit and touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, “Eph-phatha,” that is, “Be opened.”

Every night before I go to sleep, I put my fingers in my ears; I spit and touch my tongue, and looking up to heaven, I sigh and write the ancient word upon my hand. I spell it across my forehead; I open my thighs and write the letters down that slope, against that place, the only place, that is as dark and silent as the cave inside my head.

I pull my hands away from Doctor and stand up. “Eph-phatha,” I write across the width of Doctor’s forehead, and I laugh through my tears because I have finally spelled a word that he does not know.

I
love to ride in carriages, even over patched and bumpy roads in an April thunderstorm, which was the state of things all the way to Hanover. I opened the window and let the cold rain lash my face. Sarah probably got drenched as well, since we both had to kneel on the carriage floor because of our crinolines. I had told off Doctor, I had told off Sarah, there was no stopping me, for if I stopped, I might fall into despair. And so I continued in high form, even allowing my voice full rein. I laughed, giggled, shouted, and let loose with as many rude or merry noises as I could conjure. The coachman must have thought me an imbecile, but I am done with worrying about what others think. Where has that gotten me, after all? I kept my music box in my lap, the prize that Doctor gave me for my twelfth birthday, and cranked it over and over, the three songs it plays dancing on my thighs. It must have driven Sarah to distraction, and while that was not my intent, nor did it serve to deter me. She has told me again and again that she does not want to marry Mr. Bond, that she never did, and that she has refused him. I no longer care. I am for me, all for me, and I am full of it; I am ripping at the seams, a Laura doll that walks and barks and bangs ahead. My family will find me changed, I’m sure, and not to their liking, but so be it.

Papa told me not to return home until I could speak, but I had no choice. He has only hit me once this time; Sarah’s presence probably ensures his probity. My dear old Asa comes for me in the mornings, and I stay out with him all day, playing in the woods. Mama scolds me for being filthy, but now I only wash once a week, and I stay in my favorite blue dress, even in bed, having flung my corset and crinoline and petticoats across the room as soon as I arrived. I hope they throw them in the fire. I have no use for such frippery, so why continue the charade of posing as a lady? One might as well put a ball gown on a pig and a silk stovepipe on Asa.

I invite Asa in for tea or supper every night that suits me and serve meals of my own creation, which only he and I eat: raw sliced potatoes with onions, soaked in milk; porridge with fatback and apples. I eat with my hands and dust the crumbs onto the floor. I bring the dogs into the house and roll on the floor with them, letting them lick me all over. I carry a robin’s nest Asa found for me in the big oak into my bed and wait for the babies to hatch, so that they can sleep with me, their downy fluff against my cheek. I am middling careful, but I wake one morning with bits of shell pricking my backside and tiny feathers mixed with ooze down my bare legs. Twice I knock over the bucket in the night and leave the contents to despoil the rug. Someone will clean it up—it doesn’t bother me―I can’t smell the stench. I play between my legs whenever I want and read from my Bible, occasionally at the same time. I moan with delight, and Sarah reaches up from her pallet on the floor to stop me, but I will not be stopped.

“Think of little Mary,” Mama says, but I am no example. I am no longer an Inspiration to Others. I am the creature that I am, and finally I am free, not in peril of pleasing anyone. Not Doctor, not Papa, not even goody Miss Wight.

She insisted on coming, though I did not want her. She should go to the islands with her Mr. Bond, convert the heathen, dance naked with the natives. No word from her when it was warranted, not one, that Mr. Bond was courting
her
. Foolish is a small package for how I feel. I am careful not to step on her head when I get up for the bucket, but I do not converse with her unless absolutely necessary, and spend much of my days slapping away her hands. Doctor dismissed her as my teacher—what is she waiting for?

I have been here almost a month, and though the days of freedom are long, I have ceased to find joy in my wildness. I have written letters to my friends all over the world, pressed with pansies or violets, asking if I might visit them. I am certain to hear from Miss Dix any day, and others too. Something that had been hidden from me has come to light and has brought my spirits lower than ever before. When Doctor turned me out, I had some understanding of his logic, though I prayed that his devotion would win out over any rational argument. To love me is not rational, I realized long ago, and so I prize those who do so highly.

Doctor no longer loves me, and he ordered Sarah to bring with her the proof, Perkins’ “Fourteenth Annual Report,” to give to my parents. Doctor’s Annual Reports about me have circulated the world all these years, been pored over by the philosophers, and detailed in the papers. He has sung my praises to the rooftops and detailed every aspect of my activities, my progress, my learning and growth. Though he has always claimed that my moral and intellectual senses have triumphed over my physical limitations under his guidance, in this latest report he wrote that I am “very liable to derangement.” My volatile disposition he now attributes to disturbing forces within my very constitution, which I have inherited from my parents. Miss Wight did not plan to tell me, and my dear mother was apparently suppressing her deep humiliation so as not to cause me further grief, but neither of them could contain my father’s rage. Doctor had written that Papa had a small brain and that Mama’s “though active was not much bigger.” He even decided that this temperament of mine, this “dash of the scrofulous,” had predisposed me to the fever in the first place. So I am blamed for my condition and for bringing shame upon my family.

“Small brain!” Papa shouted and forced Mama to rap his outrage into my palm. “Because of you,” she wrote, people all over the world had read about his faculties so mightily insulted, along with those of his family. I don’t believe Papa has a small brain, though perhaps a less than average-sized heart. “Asa is the small brain,” Papa yelled, and blamed him for my present wildness, threatening to throw me out into the wilderness with only my beloved half-wit to care for me. Papa barred the door against Asa, and Mary says he pounds upon it for hours, then sits outside and howls for me, and also for the penknife that I slipped from his pocket while he lay snoring in our favorite meadow. Bereft of Asa’s company, I start to talk to Wight again, in the blind hope of understanding Doctor’s denial of all that we have accomplished over the years, his denial of my very self. The one true thing he reported is that I am indeed subject to derangement; many have seen that aptitude and even its consequences. And in the month here in Hanover, I have nourished this propensity until even I can’t stand the beast.

Wightie cries in my arms. Perhaps she is becoming a bit deranged as well. She repeats that she does not want to marry Mr. Bond and go to the islands, but I know that anything must be better than her place here beside my bed. Doctor has disparaged her also in the report, blaming her for allowing my grosser tendencies free rein and hinting that she was perhaps too melancholy to be inspiring as a teacher. How wrong he is, but the best I can do now is to comfort her, to assure her that she has been, and will always be, my darling Wightie, and that without her, I probably would not have survived at all. In the tin bath, I scrub myself sore.

I have my family, for the time being, but it’s as though I am borrowing a family, that I do not own one like other people. Addison has gone away to school, so there is no one to make me laugh. Little Mary, nine now, sticks by me like a shepherd with a lamb and pets me like one as well. We pet each other, and in that I find great solace. Her hair is long and straight and silky, and I entertain her by pulling it across my upper lip like a mustache or draping it round my chin as a beard. I would like very much to finger Papa’s beard—he has muttonchops—but he pushes my hand away, not gently. I know he does not want me here. Though I am hardly an extra mouth to feed, I still must be watched and taken care of. The food they needn’t worry about because I am down to a few tablespoons of milk and gruel a day. I am not trying to starve myself, I keep telling Mama and Sarah—who will not leave because she is afraid for me—but what I don’t tell them is that I will not try to stop it if it happens. For once, I finally feel free to refuse food. I do not want it; I do not suffer pangs of hunger. Would they not be better off if I starved? I am not feeding on pity with that sentiment; I think it is a cold, hard fact. I am even too tired to whittle away any more of myself with Asa’s knife, though the slanting cuts on my thighs still sting. Blood, they must’ve thought, from the dead chicks or from my monthly, which I’ve ceased having. Mama and Wightie don’t bother to poke and prod and check my body like they did when I was a girl. No doubt they are afraid of what they might see.

Last year at Perkins, a Back Bay society belle about my own age came to visit with her mama and papa. She allowed me to touch her clothes, even the damask camellias on her hat worn to the side and tied with a big satin bow under her chin. She opened and closed her parasol and let me twirl it, scrunch up its ruffled edges. “Pink,” she told me, and I imagined myself all swathed in pink, flowers on my hat, bow beneath my chin, mincing about in dainty velvet slippers with kitten heels. I was beautiful, shining, in my head. She enlisted Tessy to tell me she’d give me her parasol if she could ask me one question, just one. Of course.

Tessy’s fingers hesitated, and then she wrote, “Why haven’t you killed yourself? I would.”

I tried as hard as I could, but I couldn’t think of a single answer to that question, so I gave back her parasol. Why indeed? This bilious femme was perhaps my most erudite visitor, asking the question, the most important question, that all the acclaimed philosophers and poets dared not ask. I have kept the memory of those words scalded in my palm until they have burnt through the flesh, into my heart, where they will reside forever. The brilliant girl with the pink parasol.

I lie in the same little bed in which I writhed with fever all those years ago, the bed in which I saw my last sights, heard my last sounds, maybe Mama saying my name or Addison laughing. Maybe my own sobs. I tasted my last sweetness here, porridge with sugar or a hard butter candy. I inhaled the last scent of my mother, talcum powder and grease and coffee. I dream almost all the time—sometimes terrible dreams where giant birds tear at my limbs, other times lovely ones about going on a honeymoon to Europe with Addison or Tessy, or flying high above the earth, seeing all the wonders down below. Mama comes for my hand, and little Mary, and of course Sarah, and I wave them away, or sometimes do not move at all, but let them tap until they give up. Papa finally allows Asa back to visit, and he comes every day for a while, but then he stops because really he only enjoys me when we can go outside and play; he has no use for a girl in a bed. Papa is relieved, I do not doubt, that I have ceased to terrorize the household, and he never strays near my tiny alcove, not even when I stop eating entirely.

“70 pounds,” Mama says after she forces me up to weigh, and then it seems only a few dreams later that I wake to her writing, “60. Please.” She’s put a pan in the bed, but I’m too tired to be ashamed. I still read my Bible when I can muster it, and the Psalms grant me my only pleasures. Psalm 139:
O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me! Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up; thou discernest my thoughts from afar.

Sarah reads me a letter from Doctor saying that I can come back to Perkins, if I’d like. She has obviously written to him that I am wasting, appealing to his vanity, if not to his moral sensibilities, that I will perish without him. There is even a short note from Julia inquiring about my health, but I can’t concentrate on her dither.
Thou searchest out my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.
I no longer wish that I had wrought a cameo of Doctor’s head to lie on my pillow because I finally understand how hard and lifeless it would be. He was never mine; no one was ever mine or will ever be mine. Darling Mary, with her soft hair brushing across my face, her sweet, wet kisses on my cheek, her tears on my bony breast, and yet still she is not mine. Addison comes home, or maybe I dreamt him, but he appears at my bedside and my fingers brush the grizzle on his chin. They seem to orbit me now—my family—as if I am a dying planet. Not a sun, never a sun; any light I had to give is dying with each day.
Thou dost
beset me behind and before, and layest thy hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it.

I am in and out of the hours, days, and nights cut from the same cloth.
Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend to heaven, thou art there! If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!
Over and over Sarah pulls my hands from the bedclothes and opens my palms.
Tap-tap-tap.
My last connection with this world.
Tap-tap-tap.
Once I am awake for a bit and up to a spoon of gruel, when I realize she is writing about Miss Dix. I force myself to attention, struggle to focus on her fingers. She reads me a letter: Miss Dix has raised funds for a companion for me. For life. For my life. She has written to Doctor. I ask Sarah to read it again and again until I understand that it is true. I must lie back and rest now. The news overwhelms me. When I wake, I am certain that I have imagined this wonder, but Sarah assures me that the offer is a fact. I hold the paper in my hands and feel myself begin to stir.

Hungry. Mama brings me soup, and I let Mary spoon it to my lips. It tastes of nothing but warmth, but that is enough.

More letters from Doctor. Julia has given birth to another daughter, and they have named her Laura Elizabeth after me. I wonder what he promised Julia to make her consent to such an extraordinary thing. I will have to go soon to hold her, the little Laura. In my head I add her to my collection of dolls. And the blinds: I am often dismissive of them, even facetiously so—my God-given singularity my defense—and yet I know that my very life offers proof to them that if I can accomplish some, then they can accomplish more.